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Not Quite Frankenstein

Where can you watch a group of inanimate objects come together, form a cohesive structure, and start displaying what looks very much like organic behavior?

You might say this sounds like a modern-day Frankenstein.

But for a real-life example, you could visit the laboratory of psychologist James Dixon in Storrs, Conn.

Dixon and his colleagues at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) are building a research program around the idea that a lot can be learned about perception and action in living things from observing inanimate objects.

“Our observations suggest that matter that has become life has found some physical principle that we don’t quite understand yet,” says Dixon, associate professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

He calls the concept “radical,” “way out there,” and “potentially transformative.”

And that’s just what the National Science Foundation thought, too, when it awarded Dixon and his colleagues – a team of psychologists, physicists, chemists, and physical therapists – an $800,000 grant under the INSPIRE program: Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education. The federal program supports work that doesn’t fall under traditional scientific disciplines and involves particularly novel, think-outside-the-box research ideas.

Dixon says that the diversity of living things capable of perception and action suggests that these abilities may have arisen through general physical principles that complex biological systems have exploited.

The goal of his work is to understand how these principles that govern the flow of energy in simple nonliving systems can be scaled up to help explain behavior in living things.

Metallic behavior

The idea that physics and chemistry could somehow explain behavior is not new, says Dixon. Scientists as far back as the 1920s have been thinking about the flow of energy and matter through physical systems in ways that relate to the actions of organisms.

Building on these ideas, Dixon and his colleagues have taken an approach that he calls a “new starting point” for understanding perception and action that is based not in the complexities of biology, but in the principles of thermodynamics.

“For more than a century, we have tried to understand action by studying systems that are immensely complex, with billions of years of evolutionary history,” he says. “But what if you start from the ground up?”

With his collaborators at CESPA, Dixon has been using simple systems that he says display surprisingly complex behavior. For example, one experiment uses a handful of ball bearings sitting together in a petri dish filled with oil.

An electrical current applied to the system charges the ball bearings, which become attracted to one another and form a cohesive structure. But even though the energy flow is constant, the metal bits keep moving around and responding to their environment. These unpredictable movements, Dixon says, can be considered a rudimentary form of perception and action.

With the new funding, his team hopes to build and observe increasingly complex nonliving systems that converge on the behaviors of the simplest organisms.

Not quite Frankenstein

Dixon makes very clear that the observations he and his team make can all be accounted for by physical principles.

“Everything we’re doing is explainable at the local level, by the physical laws of nature,” he says. The flow of energy and matter through systems is understandable in terms of physics and chemistry, he emphasizes.

But the interesting things happen when objects, like the ball bearings, create unexpected organized structures.

“There are configurations that the ball bearings will and won’t sit in,” Dixon explains. “The system doesn’t always end up the way we think it will – it doesn’t always behave predictably.”

With his colleagues James Rusling of the Department of Chemistry; Tehran Davis, Bruce Kay, Claudia Carello, and Till Frank of the Department of Psychology; Jeff Kinsella-Shaw in the Neag School of Education’s Department of Kinesiology; and Dilip Kondepudi, a chemist at Wake Forest University, Dixon wants to create a new field of study connecting biological phenomena, self-organizing systems, and the principles of thermodynamics.

“There’s an additional layer here that hasn’t been fully explained,” he says.

Ultimately, the results of the project might inform a new type of engineering, in which a system self-organizes its perception and action to achieve goals.

Moreover, Dixon says that this new line of research could help scientists understand the origin of life: how at some point in the history of the universe, matter that was nonliving organized itself and produced living organisms.

But, he says with a laugh, there is absolutely no danger of a creating a Frankenstein in his laboratory.

“We like to joke sometimes that the system is having ‘a bad day’,” he says. “But at the end of the day we turn it off, and it turns off just fine.”

Join us for a talk by Gina Barreca,2018 UCONN BOARD OF TRUSTEESDISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

All great works of fiction, poetry and dramaâas well as texts forming mythologies, religions, national epics to heroic sagasâhave loneliness at the heart of their narrative. From Persephone to Peter Pan, from âFrankensteinâ to âFrozen,â the stories we pass along are saturated with unwilling isolation.âOnly around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions,â according to a 2017 study. A former U.S. Surgeon General argues that âWe live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.â We need more than social media. We need social contact. We need community. How can we break through the loneliness barrier? Being alone when in need of companionship is more than sad; itâs an epidemic.Chronic loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. We need to change our national story and, often, our personal ones as well.Even the concept of the âlone wolfâ is a myth. Wolves hunt in packs.

Reception to follow.

For more information about this event, or if you are an individual who requires special accommodation to participate, please contact the CLAS Deanâs Office at (860) 486-2713.

A liberal arts and sciences degree prepares students with the tools they need to excel across a wide range of careers. Given the number of options available to you, it can be overwhelming to narrow down career choices. Attending CLAS Career Night will provide you exposure to career opportunities for CLAS students.

This semesterâs focus will be on research-based careers. During this event you will engage with CLAS alumni, learn about various occupations, and gain insight about how to best prepare for your future career.

The McNair Scholars Program and the Office of Undergraduate Research invite you to join us for a brown bag research seminar.

Birds, Bacteria, and Bioinformatics: Why Evolutionary Biology is the Best

Sarah Hird, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

This series is open to all undergraduate and graduate students, and is designed especially for students conducting (or interested in conducting) STEM research. These seminars are opportunities to learn about research being pursued around campus, to talk with faculty about their path into research, and to ask questions about getting involved in research.

About CLAS

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is the academic core of learning and research at UConn. We are committed to the full spectrum of academics across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We give students a liberal arts and sciences education that empowers them with broad knowledge, transferable skills, and an ability to think critically about important issues across a variety of disciplines.